実際に動いているもの
New Caledonia sits on one of the largest nickel resources on Earth and has smelted it locally for over a century. Its ore is the saprolite kind — good for metal, poor for batteries — so it goes into stainless steel rather than into cells. The economics turn almost entirely on the price of power on a small island.
- 素材
- Nickel
- 種類
- Saprolite laterite ore, roughly 2% nickel, low cobalt
- 起点
- New Caledonia — The nickel-rich massifs of Grande Terre, a fragment of ancient ocean floor pushed above sea level
工程ごと、越境地点ごとに
New Caledonia · Grande Terre 保管者 SLN, Prony and KNS operations (採掘会社)
Scraping the hillside
Laterite sits at the surface, so it is stripped with excavators rather than blasted. The soft, deeply weathered ore needs almost no drilling.
なぜここか: Millions of years of tropical rain on ultramafic rock made this deposit. It cannot be made anywhere the climate and the bedrock do not agree.
New Caledonia · Doniambo and mine-site plants 保管者 Operators (採掘会社)
Drying and screening
Laterite arrives wet — often a third water by weight. It is dried and screened before it can be fed to a furnace.
残りはどうなったか: 300 tonnes of that shipment was water. This is why laterite is almost never exported raw over long distances — you would be paying freight on rain.
なぜここか: Drying has to happen before shipping or smelting, and the cheapest place to do it is at the mine.
New Caledonia · Doniambo smelter, Nouméa 保管者 Société Le Nickel (精製業者)
An electric furnace on an island
Calcined in a rotary kiln, then smelted in an electric arc furnace to ferronickel — an iron-nickel alloy that goes straight into stainless steel.
残りはどうなったか: Almost everything else is slag. The nickel was never more than about 2% of what came out of the ground.
なぜここか: Smelting at home keeps the value and the jobs on the island. It also means every tonne of metal carries the cost of island power, which is the industry's permanent problem here.
Japan · Japan, Korea or Europe 保管者 Steelmakers (製造業者)
To a stainless mill
Ferronickel is shipped as ingot or shot directly to stainless steel producers.
なぜここか: Ferronickel has exactly one customer: the stainless steel industry. It cannot be redirected to batteries.
Japan · Stainless mill 保管者 Steelmakers (製造業者)
Stainless steel
Melted with chromium and iron into austenitic stainless — sinks, cutlery, chemical plant, architectural cladding.
なぜここか: Two-thirds of all nickel still goes into stainless steel. The battery story is the newer and smaller half of the market.
これは計算例である。公表された標準的な歩留まりと回収率を用いて、明示された出発量を追うものであり、比率は検証可能だが、特定の荷物の記録ではない。経路に関する事実——どの国を経由するか、どのような工程を経るか、なぜその素材を他の場所では処理できないか——は公開情報から編集している。